THE CRITIQUE IS ESSENTIAL TO RECONSTRUCTING THE STATE AND POLICY IN A LESS MASCULINIST WAY

Susan Baker, Senior Lecturer in European Social Research at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, 1999; WOMEN AND PUBLIC POLICY: THE SHIFTING BOUNDARIES BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES, "Risking Difference: Reconceptualizing the Boundaries between the Public and Private Spheres," EE2001-hxm p. 4

The aim of this book is to go beyond this debate and to explore the factors that have contributed to women's exclusion from rights and full citizenship. It begins by linking the construction of a dichotomous relationship between the public and private spheres to the theory and practice of women's exclusion. Its focus is primarily upon women's exclusion from the modern (welfare) state. However, the book attempts to move beyond the stage of critique and open up tile way for an alternative and more positive project: the construction of a new understanding of the public-private worlds. This new understanding goes beyond the demands of liberal, rights feminism, because it seeks something more radical than women's inclusion into formal citizenship. It also wants to reconstruct the idea of citizenship, and to do so in a way that accepts the diversity and difference of both the female and the male. Rather than accepting the ideal that rights should accrue to the abstract, universal, and non-gendered citizen, this analysis argues instead for a concept of citizenship that is embodied, particular, and gendered, Only through this concept of citizenship can true equality be achieved, because it is only in this reconceptualization that the richness or full humanness of the other, their needs, aspirations, modes of thinking, and ways of acting can be fully realized. This project is of interest to more than feminist analysis: it is fundamental to the project of constructing a new understanding of politics and the political process. It is compatible with similar projects being undertaken by regional and ethnic minorities, by new social movements, and by social actors, who are all pushing the boundaries of what constitutes politics. These groups are moving society towards a model of governance that challenges the liberal conception of the abstract, universal, male citizen that is assumed to stand for all; there is increasing demand that social groups be allowed to stand for themselves.

A FEMINIST CRITIQUE COULD RESTRUCTURE PRIVACY RIGHTS IN A LESS EXCLUSIONARY NATURE

To strengthen the case for privacy, liberalism and liberal feminism should carry forward three reconstructive projects that relate to these reasons for feminist resistance to privacy: (1) bolster liberalism's normative account of the value of privacy and the human goods that it helps to secure; (2) offer a persuasive argument for the continuing importance of some form of the public/private distinction; and (3) explore how best to conceive of privacy not merely as a negative liberty, but as requiring a conception of governmental responsibility to secure the preconditions for enjoying privacy and exercising autonomy (or "private choice"). Allen's essay helpfully suggests these three projects; moreover, her normative theorizing about privacy makes a substantial contribution to them. n27 I also draw on some of my own recent work on liberal justifications for toleration to suggest ways to fortify the case for privacy. Finally, taking the project to be reconstruction, I suggest valuable lessons from the Reconstruction era for contemporary imagery and understandings of privacy.

Ultimately, feminist critiques of privacy highlight the need to sort out "dubious uses of the notion of privacy" n87 and to reject the invocation of the values of privacy to "mask exploitation and abuse." n88 The reconstructive task is to build the normative case for privacy and autonomy as valuable, and perhaps indispensable, elements in a conception of free and equal citizenship for women as well as men. By appealing to liberal toleration, abolitionism, and feminism, as well as to the creative resonances among them, we may be able to reconstruct the roots of privacy and offer some alternative images of it. In so doing, we can better express why the right to be let alone may be the right most valued by "civilized" women as well as men. n89

RECOGNITION OF THE CONTINGENCY OF THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DICHOTOMY IS KEY TO ITS RECONSTRUCTION THROUGH THE FEMINIST LENS

An adequate liberal account of privacy requires a persuasive articulation, rather than abdication, of a public/private distinction. To use Allen's formulation, this is the important task of rescuing the public and the private, n90 which requires a liberal framework within which "public and private are contingent, transformable conceptions of how power ought best to be allocated among individuals, social groups, and government." n91 Perhaps the most forceful and pervasive feminist criticism of privacy- and of the public/private distinction-stems from its role in allowing unjust and hierarchical distributions of power between men and women that have left women subject to the "private sovereignty" of men. n92 For example, Professor Reva Siegel's historical analysis of the evolving legal treatment of violence against women in the home powerfully demonstrates how, even after the law's formal repudiation of the idea of coverture and a husband's right to administer "chastisement" to his wife, and even after the evolution from a model of authoritarian marriage to companionate marriage, courts continued to use the concept of "affective" or marital privacy to shield the home from public exposure, leaving women without a remedy against intimate violence. n93 An adequate account of governmental noninterference with private choice and private life must condemn this invocation of privacy to immunize private violence.

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DICHOTOMY IS KEY TO ENDING PATRIARCHY AND OPPRESSION

Leonore Davidoff, Prof. of Sociology at the University of Essex, 1998; FEMINISM, THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE, "Regarding Some 'Old Husbands' Tales': Public and Private in Feminist History," EE2001-hxm p. 165

For feminist historians, the public/private distinction has been linked to the notion of separate spheres, one of the most powerful concepts within women's history since its recrudescence in the 1960s. Such binary distinctions have come under attack from a range of theoretical positions, including powerful feminist solvents which stress multiplicity, plurality, and the blurring of boundaries. Yet there continues to be fascination with the seeming separation of private and public life in our own later twentieth-century situation as we juggle the multi-layered psychic structures of femininity as well as confronting feminine roles of daughter, wife, and mother with professional identity and/or political activism. In Ann Snitow's memorable phrase: 'Modern women experience moments of free fall. How is it for you, there, out in space near me? Different I know. Yet we share some with more pleasure, some with more pain-this uncertainty-"

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE IS KEY TO THE REVALUATION OF NATURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

Sherry B. Ortner, Prof. of Anthropology at Columbia University, 1998; FEMINISM, THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE, "is Female to Male as Nature is to CuIture?," EE2001-hxm p. 40

Finally, woman's intermediate position may have the implication of greater symbolic ambiguity (see also Rosaldo, 1974). Shifting our image of the culture/nature relationship once again, we may envision culture in this case as a small clearing within the forest of the larger natural system. From this point of view, that which is intermediate between culture and nature is located on the continuous periphery of culture's clearing; and though it may thus appear to stand both above and below (and beside) culture, it is simply outside and around it. We can begin to understand then how a single system of cultural thought can often assign to woman completely polarized and apparently contradictory meanings, since extremes, as we say, meet. That she often represents both life and death is only the simplest example one could mention.